“…Indeed, PD can be effectively used in the multiscale modeling of materials in different ways: it can serve as a bridge between molecular dynamics (MD) and continuum elasticity (CE) to help mitigate the difficulties encountered when one attempts to couple MD and CE directly [4,5,11,15,18] and, in some situations, PD can be used as a stand-alone model to capture the behavior of materials over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. For example, to study problems involving defects, one can use the same equations of motion over the entire body and no special treatment is needed near or at defects [6,22].…”